Public funds, private interests intersect in building owned by Bridgeview mayor

Joe Mahr and Joseph Ryan, Chicago Tribune reporters

The century-old gray office building may not look like much — its owner says it can be hard to rent — but it has become a central meeting place for private interests and public money.

The Summit building's owner is state Sen. Steven Landek. He has other jobs. He is mayor of Bridgeview. He also chairs the Lyons Township political fund. And both those roles intersect in his relationships with those who pay him rent.

One of his tenants is the political fund he chairs. The fund has gotten tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from those contracting with Bridgeview, where Landek has been mayor for more than a decade. And the fund pays Landek the landlord nearly $2,000 a month to rent space in his building — more than $150,000since 1998.

Another tenant, CDK Accounting, has a bookkeeping contract with Landek's village that has paid CDK more than $1.2 million since 2005. Neither Landek nor CDK will say how much the firm pays him in rent. As an elected official, Landek must disclose the sources ofsome outside income by state law, but not the rent he collects from vendors whose contracts he helps oversee.

Another tenant, state Rep. Mike Zalewski, has paid Landek $500 a month out of his state-funded district expense account. Zalewski's father is a Chicago alderman who pushed his son's candidacy; the father also has a side job as a lobbyist, and the village has paid the alderman's firm at least $60,000.

Zalewski wasn't the only politician tenant. Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica, a Republican, once set up a district office in Landek's building, so county taxpayers gave the landlord $500 a month. Peraica's law firm has done legal work for Bridgeview.

Landek didn't respond to detailed questions about the intersection of his real estate business with his public service. Ald. Michael Zalewski didn't return phone calls seeking comment. Peraica has defended his rent deal.

CDK's president, Jeff Bishop, told the Tribune in a written statement that he's been the village bookkeeper since 1985 but had no idea who owned the building until after he signed the lease agreement in 2003: "I hope you are not implying that there is anything being done that is inappropriate or wrong. This is the work I do, and I have built a reputation of honesty, accuracy and perfection that clients appreciate."

But campaign-reform advocates question the arrangements.

"They are all tightly connected," said David Morrison, deputy director of the watchdog Illinois Campaign for Political Reform. "Voters and taxpayers and people who are affected are well within their right to ask who is actually looking out for them when their elected officials have so many different hooks into the system."

Landek landed or kept politically connected tenants despite his complaints about how tough the rental market has been. He has made that complaint in successful efforts to have county officials cut his property tax bill roughly in half in the past three years, tax records show.

In a successful 2008 pitch for lower taxes, Landek, through a lawyer, argued that the building, at 63rd Street and Archer, was "an old office building suffering from functional obsolescence." Worse yet, the recession had made it harder for landlords to fill buildings. And, he declared, landlords "are unable to increase rents."

Yet in 2009, despite his expressed fears of stagnant rent a year earlier, Landek was able to get one tenant to pay more. That was the political fund. When one of Landek's nonpolitical tenants moved out, the fund chaired by Landek tripled what it was paying him.

It's unclear if the fund took up more space in the building. Even if it had kept the old space and expanded into the new space, its rent was 27 percent more than what it and the old tenant had been paying combined, according to a Tribune analysis of records Landek provided the county.

The fund also paid Landek at least $50,000 in back rent in the past decade — money the fund, chaired by Landek, said it has owed him for years. But the nature of those payments raises additional questions. The Tribune found that when the fund later made up for missed payments, it sometimes paid Landek double the $500 to $600 he usually charged for rent. Landek declined to explain the numbers.

Through an email from a spokesman, Landek said the political fund follows state campaign finance and disclosure laws.

Those laws say political funds can't pay "clearly in excess" of the going rate for rent and other items. But disclosure rules don't require candidates to publicly justify rent amounts.